Wooplr raises $5M from Helion to make fashion shopping social and local

Local shopping and social discovery app Wooplr has raised US$5 million in series A funding from Helion Venture Partners. The app lets users discover fashion and food products they like, find what’s trending around them through photographs, and recommend those to their friends and the community.

According to Rahul Chandra, co-founder and managing director of Helion Ventures, Wooplr’s offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions in mobile commerce. “It brings together both online and offline retailers on a common platform. We believe the market will continue to see a shift towards mcommerce,” he says.

The Bangalore-based startup was founded by four former McAfee employees – Arjun Zacharia, Praveen Rajaretnam, Soumen Sarkar, and Ankit Sabharwal – in 2011. It started out as a Facebook page which encouraged people, especially women, to post pictures of cool stuff with details of where they bought it, price, and brand. On March 8, International Women’s Day, 2013, Wooplr stepped out of a closed beta and launched its Android app. Now it can be accessed on iOS and Windows apps too as well as the web.

“There is still so much that remains unknown and unexplored even in the localities we live in. On a Saturday night, we call our friends or family and ask ‘What do we tonight?’ And almost always, we end up going to the same malls, restaurants, pubs, and cinemas. Even for other products and services, be it salons, gift shops, boutiques, gaming arenas, print, or a computer store, our choices have remained constant. Why not change that?” Rajaretnam, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Wooplr, writes in the company blog.

Another attraction for users of Wooplr is the chance to follow people they think have a cool sense of fashion. They could be friends as well as models. Early on, the Wooplr team got some fashion bloggers and students from fashion institutes on to the platform. What they share about cool things they’ve found are a big draw. In this, it’s somewhat like the app Pose which lets you follow fashion influencers who upload photos of the latest additions to their closet.

80 percent of shoppers on Wooplr are women.

Wooplr helps local businesses too by providing a single-point mobile application to manage their marketing, community building, and sales. It has onboarded 14,000 shops and plans to scale that up to 100,000 this year with the series A funding. Last year, it added a location-based feature called ‘Nearby’ to point users to the nearest shops which have what they like.

“Wooplr has just scratched the surface of the potential that mcommerce has to offer in India to both consumers and merchants. The financial support and domain expertise of Helion Ventures and our angel
investors will help us execute our vision even more rapidly and with focus,” co-founder and CEO of Wooplr Arjun Zacharia says.

Recently, another Bangalore-based startup Lookup, a local shopping app, raised funding from Japan’s DeNA and Teruhide Sato, founder of BEENOS group. A sort of Craiglist and WhatsApp rolled into one, Lookup lets users send messages to listed shops and restaurants to place orders for home delivery. Any store or restaurant using Lookup can respond instantly.

See: College dropout turned MIT top innovator rolls Craigslist and WhatsApp into one app for local shopping in India